The son of a Prairie minister, Stiller, one of the most celebrated minds in medicine, says he grew up believing that “you were put on Earth to serve.” He entered medicine because of the man who cared for his father when he was dying of kidney disease, a Mennonite doctor, would bring caseloads of medicine the family couldn’t afford to the house every Monday. “I don’t know if he stole it or bought it, but I loved that man,” Stiller says. “Oh man, I loved that man.”

Stiller is a believer in beneficence, in doing good, and his ideas for how the nation might mark its 150th anniversary involve something more human than concrete or steel.

“Monuments don’t do it for me,” Stiller says. “Monuments might be part of it. But surely, as we think forward, something physical is the past. Something human is the future.”

Stiller, 71, is a physician, scientist and entrepreneur renowned for his contributions to organ transplantation. In the 1970s, he shepherded a groundbreaking Canadian study into cyclosporine, the immune-suppressing drug that, more than 40 years later, remains the front-line treatment to prevent organ rejection.

Until cyclosporine, “the agent that we were using at the time was like Agent Orange,” Stiller remembers. “We killed 50 per cent of the patients who had an organ transplant.”

Stiller was the first to prove Type 1 diabetes was a disorder of the human body’s immune system. In 1986, he helped found the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, and the list of his achievements goes on: Co-founder of the Canadian Medical Discoveries Fund, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and MaRS Discovery District; past chair of Genome Canada; appointee to the Order of Canada and recipient of the Gairdner Awards, Canada’s version of the Nobel Prize.

When asked how the country might mark the approaching sesquicentennial, Stiller says he drew inspiration from “a good friend of mine”: Gov. Gen. David Johnston.

The Governor General “has enunciated this idea that Canada should even more be a country of ‘keener minds and kinder hearts.’ And so I love that idea.”

Stiller also believes that the single most important factor limiting Canada’s future competitiveness is immigration. The U.S. built its international dominance on allowing people who are “entrepreneurial and smart to immigrate,” Stiller says, “and giving them the education and freedom to express that.” Stiller says the 150th celebrations could be based on some variation of the “kinder hearts and keener minds” concept. He proposes that national contests be held for the most innovative and most caring community projects, and that, in the celebrations leading up to Canada Day in 2017, $10-million prizes be awarded to the top 10 winners — the most innovative and most caring.

In addition, he says Canada should conduct an international search for the “150,000 brightest young men and women in the world,” who, beginning in 2017 and phased over five years, would be given entrance to a Canadian university — “that’s the keener mind part” — and a scholarship based on their need. “That’s the caring part,” Stiller says.

“The big payoff for Canada is that they would also be awarded Canadian citizenship certificates upon graduation.”

Nearly a half-century out from those “halcyon days” of organ-transplantation research, Stiller says that despite the advances and “phenomenal” improvement in survival rates, “we’ve barely moved the needle in terms of organ donations.”

His hope is that science will one day discover the “good Samaritan gene” – what it is that triggers in some individuals “the need to, and the desire to give.”

More immediately, he says, the biggest change in transplant medicine will be the ability to awaken the body’s dormant stem cells to repair or rebuild damaged and failing organs.

Twenty-five or 30 years from now “organ transplantation will be seen as a very interesting chapter (in medicine), to where we actually woke up and said, ‘Oh my gosh, we can reform the organ,’ ” Stiller said.

Dr. Calvin Stiller, at-a-glance:

Born: Feb. 12, 1941

Career: Doctor, scientist and innovator who developed Canada’s organ-transplant programs. Organized trials for the drug cyclosporine that revolutionized organ transplants.

150 wish: That Canada pursue policies to make it a country of “keener minds and kinder hearts,” an idea he drew from Gov. Gen. David Johnston.